I just called out a guy on X.com as a fraud. He claimed to be a branding expert, but he doesn’t seem to know the first thing about branding. He put up a long post about Jaguar with slides of its history but completely missed all of the most important points. He doesn’t understand what led Jaguar off a cliff in the first place. I also pointed out that he’s not a car guy. That much was obvious from his post.

Both Quora and X get a lot of the “fake it till you make it” types who are big on slick marketing but are paper-thin on substance. There’s no history or character behind their words—they just spew obvious statements with no core values underpinning what they say. As the saying goes, "Stand for nothing, fall for everything." I didn’t want to give him a few pointers because he’d be easy to take apart in seconds. It’s not my wish to go around destroying people, but I will call them out.

What these frauds never get right is how companies end up in these giant messes in the first place. Jaguar’s failed rebranding started a long time ago, and you don’t put a numbers guy as CEO when they know nothing about branding—or for that matter, providing a quality ownership experience. CEO Adrian Mardell should have been shown the door a long time ago. The real reason Jaguar failed? They build shitty cars! This isn’t hard, people. They have a reputation for shitty cars, they’ve always had a reputation for shitty cars, and nobody wants a shitty car! This is so moronic. They are consistently at the bottom of the JD Power rankings, with Land Rover living there forever. My God! Zoolandering your company doesn’t mask the shitty cars!

People look at owners with puzzlement and wonder why they overlooked the fact that it’s a shitty car. Here’s a hint: people buy cars, in part, as a reflection of their personal image. It’s a bit like picking what to wear and what you want to reflect. So when people see someone buying a shitty car, of course, they wonder why. Buyers don’t want to be seen driving shitty cars and then constantly having to explain to people why it didn’t break down.

The fraudster claiming to be a branding expert never mentioned the relationship between the owner and the car—or who owns the brand in the first place. (It’s the consumer.) This isn’t a branding problem; it’s a management problem, and I’d have cleaned house a long time ago because they never addressed their quality issues. It begins with a guy like Adrian Mardell, who’s far more focused on saving a penny than improving quality and working on that one glaring image issue. Never mind the fact that the cars are neither fish nor fowl and have terrible resale value.